


been done wrong

by longtime_lurker



Category: The Social Network (2010)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-14
Packaged: 2018-01-01 11:47:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1044466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longtime_lurker/pseuds/longtime_lurker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(and now i'm tired, and i'm broke, and i feel stupid, and i feel used.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	been done wrong

**Author's Note:**

> set during the depositions and eventual settlement of the Zuckerberg-Saverin suit. please to overlook my near-total ignorance of law AND tech. \o/
> 
> end notes contain some spoilery details about the sexual content, so you can check them if you prefer to be pre-warned about that sort of thing. 
> 
> title and summary from Ani DiFranco, epigraph from The National, and one line of dialogue ripped off from Andrew Garfield, the original Mark/Eduardo shipper. originally posted to LiveJournal in May 2011.

 

  
_ does it feel like a trial? _  
_does it trouble your mind the way you trouble mine?_

 

 

  
**today**

The day they hash out the settlement is the day Mark shows up wearing an actual dress shirt and tie instead of the usual fuck-you hoodie-sandals combo, but the effect is pretty much entirely undercut by whatever the hell it is he’s got jammed in his mouth. As he slouches down into his seat Eduardo squints at him, because – is that seriously a big red sucker, like, a lollipop? Surely not, surely even Mark – wait, and yeah, yes, it is. Eduardo scoffs without even meaning to, an _uh, wow_ noise of reflexive amazement at the sheer douchebag audacity of it, and across the conference table he can see raised eyebrows from counsel on both sides. They’re professionals, but not so very professional that he can’t catch the gist of the gesture: _would you get a load of this *brat*?_

After everything that’s happened, he really shouldn’t be surprised that Mark is (still) asshole enough to sit right there in the middle of formal legal proceedings, wearing sweatpants or slurping on candy for breakfast or commenting irrelevantly on the weather, basking in his ability to get away with it. _Who’s going to call me on it?_ says the arrogant set of his chin. _*You*? I’m CEO, bitch._ Eduardo’s something of an expert when it comes to that particular Zuckerberg brand of passive-aggression, ought to be used to Mark’s rude abrasive antisocial shtick by now, but apparently the little things like this can still get under his skin. At this point he’s just surprised that Mark didn’t go the whole hog and bring in a fork and a can of reeking tuna.

Down the long table he glares at Mark: _really now?_ Mark regards him back with dark, insolent eyes, face blank of expression as he works the lollipop around in his wet red mouth, and Eduardo jerks his eyes away.

It’s possibly the single most black-comedy moment of the whole ridiculous rigmarole, and this is in the context of a suit whose testimony concerned _chicken cannibalism._ Eduardo would be amused, almost, if he weren't the one involved. There he is, with his three-piece suit and his combed hair and his family ring and his father's disapproval hanging heavy over him, and by the end of today he will almost certainly have a fortune of a settlement in his hands. And then there's Mark and Mark's fucking _sucker_ declaring just exactly what he thinks of the whole business, just like he's done with every yawn and notepad doodle and refusal to wear actual shoes. This, says his every gesture, is a mere joke, an inconvenience not worth my time.

Whatever, regardless. If Mark thinks he’s going to jar Eduardo or Gretchen into any last-minute missteps with cheap distractions like that, he’s got another think coming. If what they’ve been doing every damn night since this started couldn’t throw Eduardo off, nothing’s going to.

 

**three nights ago**

The first time it happened was the first day of depositions, after they were done, in the evening. Gretchen and the others had left already, but Eduardo was still hiding out in the men’s room like a coward, taking five to get a hold of himself.

It turned out that when you decided to sue your ex-best friend, no matter how carefully you planned it, the reality just wasn’t quite as cut-and-dried bloodlessly easy. He felt like a walking bundle of raw nerve endings, and from the look on Mark’s face as he’d rushed out of the room afterwards, he wasn’t doing much better.

Eduardo washed his hands thoroughly – more a symbolic gesture than anything, trying to rinse the day off himself – and pressed his fingertips to the corners of his eyes. They felt sore and gritty, like he’d been crying, though he hadn’t. He stared at himself in the mirror, the huge hollows of his eyes, the pinched look under them. Barely into his mid-twenties and he could already see the differences from the face he'd had as an undergrad: the harder lines, less ready smile.

He loosened his top collar button, still staring at his reflection like he was trying to convince that bleak mirror face of something, persuade its appearance to better match his inner resolve. After the first day of this shit, his determination to go through with it hadn’t lessened – if anything, in the face of Mark's pure and obdurate dickishness it was probably stronger than before – but at the same time he felt very conscious that the next few days were going to be, yeah, basically a lot of him dragging his heart through the mud for all to see.

And speak of the devil, because that was when Mark himself walked into the bathroom, outer door slamming behind him probably a little harder than necessary, and he looked even more hunched and furious than usual. Eduardo knew him well enough, still, to recognize his resentment over all that college shit that was getting dredged up, stupid and embarrassing – like Erica's statement today, with more certain to come later. For someone like Mark the deposition process had to be a special kind of hell: trawling through memories and dissecting what someone might have been thinking, feeling, other people's perspectives and emotions and all that subjective shit Mark hated. If Mark were the kind of person that hung up shitty motivational slogans in his office – which he wasn’t – his motto of choice would be **NEVER EXPLAIN, NEVER APOLOGIZE** , and Eduardo would bet the whole billion that for him, digging this shit out to air all over again was like pulling teeth.

Good.

When Mark saw him he froze on the spot, but what he didn’t do was turn around and leave the damn bathroom like any normal person would, which, great. That meant it was going to be a whole _thing._

“You expecting me to leave first or what?” Eduardo snapped finally. First to speak, which was fucking stupid of him and he regretted it even before the last word was out of his mouth, knew he should have just walked away. He hadn't ever been any good at that, though. Walking away was more Mark's forte.

“It’s not a game of chicken,” Mark told him in a smirky, maddening monotone.

“Isn't it?” Eduardo exhaled, furious at even letting himself be drawn in this far. “You realize we’re not even supposed to be talking.” Gretchen had advised him of that, stressed the inadvisability of seeing or speaking to Mark outside of that conference room, pretty strongly. This probably counted as breach of contract or something. Whatever. Eduardo wasn’t going to tell if Mark didn’t. Mark wouldn’t. Right? He felt suddenly at sea, totally unable to gauge the depths of betrayal to which Mark might plausibly put him.

“Who says _I_ want to talk?” Mark pointed out, smartmouthed as ever. “You started it,” and oh, god, Eduardo wanted to _hit_ him. He really needed to leave the room right now. He was already suing the guy: at this point, engaging with Mark’s fucking infuriating deliberately obtuse self could lead to nothing good.

He aimed for the door, ready to cut his losses and go, head back to his hotel room and knock himself out with a Tylenol PM in preparation for getting up and doing all of it over again tomorrow. But Mark, asshole that he was, shifted his weight just enough – just that step and a half enough - to get in Eduardo’s way.

Eduardo faltered in his course. “The fuck?"

He could have brushed past Mark with a rough hip-check, but that wasn't the point. The point was that he was already tired and keyed up and getting increasingly pissed off when Mark met his eyes, insinuated himself further into Eduardo's path, and lifted his shoulders into _that_ shrug, slow and contemptuous and still, apparently, able to send Eduardo from zero to rage blackout in ten seconds flat.

His hands flew up to Mark’s shoulders to _shake_ him, it was exponentially more satisfying than just breaking his laptop, and even through his red mist of rage he knew that it was suicide. An assault charge would destroy his case, easy, it would do it in a second. Just, he couldn’t even care, right then, because he just needed to _grab_ Mark, fingers gripping bruise-hard, vise-tight just to make him _stop_ that _*fucking*_ shrug –

But Mark was always _so_ bad with having someone abruptly all up in his business, and when Eduardo snatched him close it made his eyes widen, mouth fall open to suck in breath. Just instinctive reactions, but even that much of a crack in the façade split open a corresponding _something_ in Eduardo, the red rage fog only deepening as he got his hands into Mark’s stupid fucking hoodie, pushing through the thick fleece folds Mark draped around himself like armor even in fucking California, pushed them away to _get_ to Mark, finally, finally –

Mark’s eyes, blank and cold over the conference table that whole day, flashed dark and he made an involuntary sound, a rough, unlovely choke as Eduardo palmed his neck with one hand – burning hot but board-stiff, tendons strung to maximum tension – while he jabbed the other down towards the hoodie's kangaroo pocket. Mark always kept his left hand in a pocket if he had one, the mannerism an old leftover of his fencing training. It was kind of disturbing, when you thought about it, like Mark’s lizard brain was constantly expecting that he might have to fight at any moment. Which – Eduardo shook his head, trying to clear it, failing – was that what was happening here? Were they _fighting,_ seriously now, like dudebros in some bar brawl? Or –

Mark’s fingers when Eduardo brushed them were a cold contrast to the skin up on his neck (and a brief flash of memory: how Mark used to bitch to Chris and Dustin about the uselessness of Kirkland’s ancient furnaces in the Cambridge winter, hands too chilled to code smoothly) and in the depths of the pocket they clutched reflexively at Eduardo’s own, as Eduardo’s hand dug down into Mark’s lap, the fork of his thighs. Mark’s hands, pianist-graceful on a keyboard but awkward everywhere else, were clumsy now as his fingers scrabbled over Eduardo’s knuckles. There was too much of hoodie and pants in the way, baggy folds of fabric, but when he got his hand down into the right general area Eduardo still heard and felt the sharp hiss of Mark’s breath against his neck.

He flattened his other hand on the back of Mark’s neck - the first soft spot he could find, the vulnerable downy hollow where Mark’s curls began - and Mark turned his head blindly into it, eyes downcast. He was biting his bottom lip like crazy, wringing it between his teeth, mouth getting redder and redder and softer and – Eduardo ducked his chin and got his own teeth into Mark’s lower lip, had to do it, and Mark’s eyelashes tickled where they fluttered against Eduardo’s cheek, and Eduardo ground himself against Mark’s hip and worked his hand into Mark’s crotch harder.

They came at practically the same time, which was not only beyond weird but also made it _twice_ that he and Mark had gotten off simultaneously right next to each other in a goddamn public bathroom. Were all billionaire twentysomethings’ lives such neverending parades of classiness, Eduardo wondered blurrily, and scraped his nails over Mark’s collarbone as Mark’s chest heaved under his.

What set in about a millisecond later was less afterglow and more panic attack, and Eduardo backed up, snatched a handful of paper towel from the dispenser, and got the fuck out of there before he could say or do any more undeniably cathartic yet incredibly stupid shit.

He slept that night without resort to artificial means. He doesn’t really care to know what that says about him.

 

**today**

Eduardo shifts in his seat, weary. At this point – done with the depositions proper, moved on to the settlement conference – it’s really mostly just Sy and Gretchen arguing, hammering out final terms, specific and tedious. Eduardo keeps half an ear on the business end of things, just because, but if he’s being totally honest at this point he can’t even bring himself to care that much about the financial outcome. It’s not like this was ever about the _money._

Well. Okay, it was partly about the money, but the last few days have put him through the fucking wringer and by now he just wants this all over and done with.

His eyes move from Mark's long fingers (drumming silently on the table) up to Mark’s face, only now Mark is looking back. In this light his eyes are deep-set, mouth obscene. Eduardo breaks the gaze first. Is it possible to hatefuck someone just with your eyes? Because that’s what it’s felt like every time they’ve made eye contact across this conference table.

Back when he first knew Mark at Harvard the kid had totally sucked at looking anybody right in the eye, his gaze tending to flick off to the side instead, your typical socially awkward geek deal. Now, confidence increased proportionally with his power, he can do it when he has to – Eduardo’s seen him in action these last few days – but it’s still wrong, too intense, creepy, like he’s zeroing in on chunks of code instead of human beings, pinning them with that unblinking, unsettling stare.

Eduardo shakes it off and refocuses on what’s going on in the room, what Sy and Gretchen are negotiating now, but within five minutes his eyes have drifted back to Mark’s stupid red mouth working around the stupid red sucker.

He crosses his legs under the table, uncomfortably recrosses them, trying to stop the sense memories that threaten to well up: Mark, and Mark’s great big giant obvious lifelong oral fixation, and the other night.

 

**two nights ago**

That time was in the firm’s _stairwell,_ of all places, which might or might not be more tawdry than the men’s room. Eduardo doesn’t even remember why he decided to take the stairs down instead of the perfectly good elevator in the first place - to stretch his legs? - but it didn’t matter, what mattered was that there he ran into Mark _again_.

The stairwell was carpeted, a space that swallowed up the echoes of footfalls, which must have been how Eduardo managed to turn a corner and walk practically on top of Mark, at which point it was far too late to disengage with any degree of plausible deniability. Seriously, didn’t Mark have handlers or something to keep him from creeping around law firms late at night and near-bodily bumping into people who were suing him? And, also –

“Is that _my hoodie?”_ Eduardo blurted out disbelievingly, and then hated himself all over again, because he was clearly just a glutton for punishment to keep on initiating like this.

Mark glanced down at the black North Face fleece, like he didn’t even know what the hell he was wearing that day and had to remind himself – which was probably actually the case, Mark being Mark – and then back up at Eduardo, blank-faced.

“It’s not a hoodie,” he pointed out.

Eduardo blinked. When no more explanation was forthcoming: “What?”

“It has no hood.”

Eduardo stared at him, trying not to snort or, god forbid, actually laugh. For all he knew Mark was being serious. Even back when they knew each other better than anyone – no. Back when he’d _thought_ he knew Mark better than anyone – it could be hard to tell when Mark was joking.

 _“Whatever,_ that’s not the point. My point is I had that same exact one back at school and it disappeared. Is –”

“Every college kid in the country has this jacket.”

Which was annoyingly true, but didn’t change the fact that Mark was dodging the question like whoa. “Yeah, fine, but I still don’t remember us both having the same one back then. Or I mean, having like two identical ones that we could have mixed up, because I feel like that would've come up at _some_ point. I usually notice shit like that.” He didn’t know why he was suddenly getting so het up over a throwaway college garment, except that the idea of Mark having kept – and worn – his jacket for this long felt really weird to contemplate. “So did I just somehow never notice that you had that while we were at Harvard, or did you get it after, like – later than that, or –”

“Wow,” said Mark, and his voice took on a hard edge, “they told me the deposition process might get personal, but I didn’t realize it was gonna extend to my sartorial history."

“Still can’t answer a straight fucking question, can you?” Eduardo snapped, and Mark gave him this completely infuriating look of pitying condescension, all _um okay, not sure why you’re making such a big damn deal out of this, but uh –_ His mouth was a perfectly straight, flat line, and it hit Eduardo with another unwelcome memory: how back in the day Dustin used to refer to the emoticon **:|** as the Markface, an inside joke about the default expression into which Mark's features tended to arrange themselves (especially when he was glued to the computer. So, most of the time.) If Eduardo recalled correctly, the Markface had served its owner particularly well through beer-soaked poker games in the dorms, letting Mark bluff outrageously while giving nothing away.

He wondered, _who’s bluffing here, now? you? me? both?_ and tried to tamp down another laugh, knowing it would come out semi-hysterical; tried to tamp down the urge to break the hard slash of that mouth.

He didn’t succeed.

Eduardo knew already that Mark _really fucking liked_ having things in his mouth, but he hadn't known that Mark not only wouldn’t ask for it, he wouldn’t even _move_ for it. He literally – like, so literally it was laughable – refused to stretch his neck, made Eduardo come to him and not vice versa. He wouldn’t shift or bend or arch for it, wouldn’t jut his stubborn face even a few inches forward to close with Eduardo’s. But when Eduardo slammed their mouths together and pressed his tongue in alongside Mark’s, Mark shuddered immediately into hardness against Eduardo’s hips; when Eduardo pushed Mark down to his knees, hands pressing flat down against his hoodie shoulders, and destroyed the stiff set of Mark’s lips by shoving his dick between them, Mark sucked him in like he was starved for it.

His mouth was unpracticed but ruthless, and Eduardo dropped his head back against the wall in what would have been a moan if it had had any sound behind it. He shoved both hands into Mark’s dense curls, gripping tight to drag Mark’s head in closer between his open legs, and he meant to fuck hard into the soft back of Mark’s throat, make him gag, shut him _up_ for once - but all his life he’d been a big damn gentleman about that kind of thing, and when push came to shove it turned out that Eduardo physically couldn’t make himself do it. It was like at that moment his brain gave no fuck about the rules of nice normal polite sex, but his body just couldn’t ignore force of habit or muscle memory or whatever enough to make his hips snap forward and choke Mark anyway.

Mark came first, and when it happened Eduardo actually felt the throes of it _in_ Mark’s mouth: the way Mark’s lips clamped down reflexively around him, three hard pulsing sucks in a row and he was groaning, low, in his chest, then pulling off to pant hot air around the viciously sensitized head of Eduardo’s cock, one hand buried in his own lap, the other going up around Eduardo’s cock and jerking where his _mouth_ had just been, and that was it, Eduardo was done. It went all over the stairwell floor and onto Mark’s swollen bottom lip and the shoulder of his hoodie, which was objectively hilarious and, also, satisfying on some deeply sick level.

For no good reason he thought of Sean saying _They want you to say ‘thank you’ while you wipe your chin and walk away,_ and when he hauled Mark roughly to his feet he took an extra two seconds to lick roughly over Mark’s mouth, tasting himself.

“If this is, what, your idea of an apology,” he said, drawing back, and – oh. It wasn’t even like Eduardo hadn’t already known what Mark looked like when he’d just gotten off – he’d learned that shit way back when, standing guard outside the door of a club bathroom, but here it was in living color right there in front of him: Mark’s hair sweat-matted everywhere it touched his face, curling damp around forehead and temples and ears, his pupils blown to hell and back and the faintest traces of shit-eating grin playing around his wet red mouth. For once he was just another sex-stoned college guy, mouth open, eyes open, walls down.

Eduardo left his sentence hanging, turned on his heel and booked it out of the building, high on shock and orgasm for the second evening in a row.

He went back to his hotel (deliberately chosen as the best in the area that Mark _wasn’t_ staying at) and showered, planning to head down to the hotel bar later. There was still a whole day of depositions left, so he couldn’t _drink_ drink, but he needed a little something to take his mind off what had just happened.

He never did get down to the bar in question, though, because he was just toweling off his hair when the room phone rang. It was the front desk notifying him that a package had arrived for him, no sir, no name given, sorry, and Eduardo, bemused, asked them to send it up.

It was soft and pretty small, the package, and when Eduardo opened it the black fleece of the North Face jacket spilled out over his hands, and when he held it up and shook it out, a keycard bearing the logo of Mark’s hotel fell out of one of the pockets.

 

**today**

Just by the, like, osmosis of being present here in the room Eduardo’s managed to absorb enough of the proceedings to have a reasonable idea of what's going on, but he seriously doubts that the same is true for Mark. Across the table Mark looks totally checked out, the exact same look he used to get back as a freshman in Expos when he wasn’t interested in what the lecturer was saying. His chin’s propped up on one hand, the classic bored-kid-in-class pose; he appears to be staring right through the court reporter’s head, and he’s tapping what remains of the red sucker against his lips, a monotonous, automatic rhythm. Eduardo is seized by a brief, crazed urge to suddenly raise his voice and tell the whole room exactly what they’ve been doing, he and Mark. Now _that_ would throw a nice wrench into the works of the lawsuit.

The half-true and too-true things they've been stating for the record these past days, shielding or exposing themselves and each other, all of it's got Eduardo fraying at the edges. He can talk to exactly no one about the truth of any of this, really. Friends, business associates - most people he knows aren’t involved in multimillion-dollar lawsuits, let alone multimillion-dollar lawsuits against their ex-best friend, _let alone_ multimillion-dollar lawsuits against their ex-best friend with whom they've also been having sicko hatesex lately. His parents are out of the question, as is his counsel, who during their preparation for the depositions kept hinting that Eduardo should really maybe play down more the closeness of their former friendship; Gretchen had actually used the phrase “come off less like a lovers’ quarrel,” and Eduardo had had to look her in the eye, swallow down the jagged remnants of his pride and just repeat, “That’s – it’s how it went, what I told you. I don’t know what else I can say.”

And that was even _before_ he and Mark started spending their evenings banging the everloving hell out of each other.

It’s so weird for him to contemplate that in a bare few hours from now he’s not even going to be _allowed_ to talk about any of this. The settlement will be sealed, everybody's going to get non-disclosured to hell and back, and Eduardo will essentially be paid off to keep his mouth shut re: exactly how big of a bastard Mark Zuckerberg actually is.

What’s really ironic is that the only person who gets what he’s going through here is none other than Mark himself, and Eduardo thinks that maybe that's why, in between the hard eyes and hostile silences of the deposition days, they've been taking it out on each other at night.

 

**last night**

Eduardo left the firm on time for once, when his counsel did, fingering the keycard in his pocket all the while. In his hotel room he showered again, washing off the day, and changed out of his suit jacket, which felt heavy and creased after a day of cold sweating in the deposition room. Just before he left the room, on a spur-of-the-moment impulse, he grabbed the North Face fleece, shrugged it on, and left before he could change his mind.

The jacket felt warm and broken-in around his shoulders, comfortable and familiar, but the damn thing still _smelled_ like Mark, as if Mark hadn’t so much as had it dry-cleaned before returning it. Which, knowing Mark, he probably hadn’t. He tugged it tighter around himself, shivering in the air conditioning, and downstairs he had to stop off at the hotel bar for a shot or two of liquid courage before he called a cab.

At Mark’s hotel he guiltily dodged the eyes of the lobby staff, probably coming off sketchy as hell but whatever, he had a keycard in his possession. The walls of the elevator were reflective - not actual mirrors but polished steel that reflected his face blurrily back to him, his eyes like big dark wounds - and momentarily Eduardo was gripped with the absolute _need_ to reach out and punch a button to stop the elevator on its track, another one to go back down and out through the lobby and into the dark streets and back to his hotel and out of this fucking _mess._

He didn’t. He got out at the right corridor and stood outside the right door, where he briefly entertained the bizarre possibility that the keycard wouldn’t work. It did.

He pushed open the door and stepped into the room, and then halted again, because Mark was – of all things – asleep. Slumped over his laptop with his face squished unflatteringly into the desk, passed out over his coding as always, and despite himself a fond little _oh_ sounded in the back of Eduardo’s brain, because it was somehow reassuring even now, even after everything, to see that Mark’s sleep habits were still as whacked out as ever. It was, just – back in the day he’d walked in on this exact scene too many times in Kirkland, at study carrels in McKay and Cabot, for it to not stir a faint taste of _saudade._ He knew that if old habits still held, Mark had probably stayed up working feverishly until morning birdsong, snatched like two hours of sleep just as the sky began to lighten, gotten up sullen and drawn-faced to go into the firm, and crashed again in the evening after getting back to his room. God, even his sleep face still looked like it used to: lips parted, cheek resting on one arm, eyebrows scrunched in like he was pained or anxious –

The room door closed behind Eduardo with a soft _snick,_ but apparently that was enough, because Mark opened his eyes. Murmured, in the soft slur of the still-mostly-asleep, “Wardo,” and for just a moment some small buried thing stirred way down deep in Eduardo’s stomach. But as Mark woke he blinked several times and started to come back to himself, and Eduardo could see it all slipping back down over his face like a lowered blind, watched as the rigid set reentered Mark’s shoulders.

He thought that down at the bottom of himself, the very bedrock of who Eduardo Saverin was, he would never truly understand how you could know so much stupid shit about a person – their _sleep face,_ for god’s sake – and yet still somehow come to a point where even when you were in the same room, even as you locked eyes and shook out your orgasms against each other’s necks, there could be a whole cosmos of blank black nothingness stretching itself out between you.

“Didn’t think you’d come,” Mark said shortly, standing up, and Eduardo saw that, caught sleeping, Mark felt at a disadvantage and would now be extra prickly and defensive to compensate.

“Yeah, well.” That stirring thing had sunk back into stillness. Eduardo took a few steps forward. “Didn’t think you’d do a lot of things, and yet. Here we are.”

Mark’s eyes shifted down to his chest, to what Eduardo was wearing, and he said, talking fast and clipping off the words, “I apologize about the jacket, you were correct. You left it behind and I just never got around to –” and this time Eduardo did laugh, a sharp and humorless sound of disbelief, because of _course._ Of course _that_ was the thing that Mark would say sorry for, of course _that_ was the thing about which he’d admit wrongdoing, like it was about the fucking _jacket._

Mark frowned, his eyebrows lifting infinitesimally, _what?_ and Eduardo could only say, helplessly, “Fuck. You, you seriously have _no_ –” and then he gave up and shut up and just dragged Mark to him by a fistful of t-shirt, because what was the point, seriously, when they weren’t any fucking good at talking to each other anymore but there were things they _were_ good at.

They stumbled up against the foot of the bed, Mark’s hand splaying across Eduardo’s chest for balance, covering half its breadth, fingertips curling into the fleece of the stupid jacket as Eduardo trailed teeth and tongue along the sharp angle of Mark’s jawline, harsh enough to abrade the pale sun-starved skin, not caring. His back hurt, too much of today spent sitting in those uncomfortably professional conference-room chairs, so he half-pushed Mark down on the unwrinkled expanse of California king-size.

And god help him, but already in the last twenty-four hours Eduardo had somehow managed to forget the feel of Mark’s weirdly big hands and cocksucking mouth, forgotten how everything he did with them seems to be slightly, maddeningly off, like it would be improved if it were just a _little_ bit harder or softer or wetter or an inch to the left. “Not like that,” he muttered, catching hold of Mark’s wrist and dragging his hand right where he wanted it, “like _that_ – ah –”

What he really wanted – now, with everything between them gone – all he really wanted was to see Mark fucking _react,_ to make him _feel_ as visibly, as violently as Eduardo did. To crack that flat voice, smack his hoodie hunch into a tumble of limbs all over the bed, break the stone mask of his face up into something alive, forced to engage, in any way, it didn’t matter how. It was probably pretty sad that after all this time, after everything that happened, apparently all Eduardo wanted was the same thing he'd always wanted: Mark’s attention, the full brunt of that scary-intense focus just on him, for him, his.

“Come _on,”_ Mark nearly whined, out of his head by now, the whole of that genius brain gone stupid over him, and Eduardo felt the sick rush of something like satisfaction. “C’mon, let me fuck y-” and Eduardo snapped.

It was a good thing high-end hotel rooms like this one were basically soundproof, because his words came out in a near-shout: “Yeah? No, hey, please, go ahead and finish that. Fuck me over? Fuck me up?” He was not going to sue the shit out of Mark all day and then let Mark screw the shit out of him all night, that was not going to happen – _you already let him do you every other way, huh?_ an ugly little voice in the back of his head was saying, and it sounded halfway between Sean Parker and his father – “Fuck with my head? Fuck me out of my company? Exactly what kind of fucking do you think you have left to do to me here, _Mark,”_ and Mark was just about _panting_ as Eduardo flipped him, got him pinned on his back with his wrists over his head, clenched hands buried in the piles of big hotel pillows.

It wasn’t even difficult, he didn’t have to exert anywhere near his full strength, and he wasn’t sure if it was just because he was taller and actually darkened the door of a gym occasionally and didn’t spend _all_ his time hunched over a computer, or whether it was just that Mark hadn’t been expecting it and had figured that Eduardo would just lie back and take whatever Mark wanted to dish out, or even whether it was just that Mark’s body didn’t know what to _do_ with it - that weird way in which he had no idea how to handle someone in his space like that because he didn’t even seem to really inhabit himself physically, half the time. Which was yet another way in which sex with Mark was not just a surreal experience but also a terrible idea, and Eduardo was frankly surprised that Mark wasn’t kicking him in the balls and out of his room right now, but no. No - instead Mark’s eyes were dark pools, lips bitten scarlet, cock hard as nails.

“Then do it,” he was grunting, and his fingers were already working on the zip of the fleece, on Eduardo’s buttons, top and bottom. “ _Do_ it,” and it was kind of something, how even when he was about to _fuck_ Mark - oh, jesus. He was about to fuck _Mark_ \- how Mark could still somehow manage to make it feel like the other way around. Although he didn’t know why he was even surprised, that was always the way it worked for them, wasn’t it, Mark just taking and taking and -

They used complimentary hotel lotion, the hand stuff that was most definitely not designed for this purpose, and a filthy amount of spit and it had to hurt like a bitch, but anyone who knew Mark less well than Eduardo did wouldn’t have known it from the stony, stoic lines of Mark’s face as Eduardo bottomed out deep in him. His blood was pounding in his inner ear, in the hot pulse of his cock, and in his veins sang a joyless adrenaline from being under Mark’s skin in the most obscenely literal way. He could tear Mark up inside just like Mark did to him – and Eduardo had to stop, then, had to still his hips and force himself to restart slow, slow, because he was seriously _scared_ of himself right now, the same feeling he’d had when he’d smashed the laptop, like he had some violent thing living inside his bones and never knew it before.

Before this, before _Mark,_ he’d never broken anyone else’s belongings on purpose, never been in bed with someone and wanted to hurt them. It was like Mark could pull a whole separate person out of him, someone other than the cheerful shine-faced Harvard kid he'd been, somebody who screamed and smashed things and sued and screwed people. Mark _did_ that to him, Mark – and Eduardo ground his hips in deep and did things to Mark, back.

He’d slowed himself but apparently Mark didn’t want slow, was kicking his heel into the back of Edardo’s thigh, right where it met his ass, digging in hard to try and make him go faster. Eduardo rocked up into him, surging between his spread legs and pulling back again, again, staring down at Mark’s cock where it was leaking all over both their stomachs. He didn’t think he’d ever had missionary sex that involved so little looking at the other person's face. He wondered what Mark's face looked like right now.

Underneath him Mark felt weirdly close to coming, strung so tight it couldn’t be much longer now, and Eduardo felt his eyes grow burning wet. He squeezed them shut, cursing himself, biting at the plane of Mark’s neck as a distraction, and Mark actually moaned. His inner thighs where they bracketed Eduardo’s flanks were _trembling,_ he was seriously about to come any second now - and with a hand that didn’t even feel like his own anymore, Eduardo reached down and gripped Mark’s cock with one hand so hard that Mark convulsed around him, made a thin sound in the back of his throat like he’d been winded by a punch to the gut, as Eduardo held him back from his orgasm.

 _“Look_ at me,” Eduardo said, and his voice didn’t sound like his anymore, either.

And Mark did, just a second’s eye-lock and he _broke,_ stretching and straining himself up to get at Eduardo’s mouth, finally, finally reaching for it, giving himself up and over. His cheeks were absolutely burning, and when Eduardo leaned down in right next to his ear and hissed, “You’re a fucking dick and you betrayed your best fucking friend. _Live with that,”_ Mark came, face all closed in on itself, wrapped in a furious silence.

 

**today**

The first thing Eduardo thinks when he comes back in from lunch is that glory be, Mark’s done with the _fucking_ sucker. His mouth is still really red from it though. It makes him look like he’s been feeding on something that bled.

Mark apparently didn’t leave for lunch at all, is too busy pacing around the conference room trying to get a decent wireless signal on his laptop, and after an awkward moment of hesitation Eduardo gets his laptop out, too. He’s not about to back down and leave the room until their respective lawyers get back from their leisurely three-martini lunches, ninety minutes no doubt spent bitching about the nerve of that Zuckerberg punk. Not that he blames them there. Eduardo has sat in on both of Mark’s current suits for enough hours of his life, now, to see that Mark’s counsel would kill to be able to do this without the actual presence of Mark, whose personal demeanor is a liability. Enormous retainer paid out of Mark’s allegedly ill-gotten billions or no, Eduardo bets that Sy and company will be celebrating to see the back of _this_ client.

(He wonders, idly, how many of the people Mark knows now would be willing to exist in a state of mutual toleration with him if he weren’t Facebook’s world-famous CEO, if he were still some random undergraduate nobody without old money or a WASPy name or even your basic set of social skills. Who reminds Mark to get actual sleep or meals these days, who grabs him energy drinks and beer from the fridge while he’s deep in code? Some assistant who’s overpaid to put up with his shit, most likely, which must suit Mark better than actual friends anyway. Eduardo doesn’t know why he’s still bothering to waste valuable braincells contemplating Mark’s lonely soul or whatever. Mark probably doesn’t even _have_ a soul.)

Their strategy of ignoring each other by burying themselves in their respective digital devices, just like good citizens of the twenty-first century, is unfortunately being stymied by the fact that Eduardo can’t get a good signal either. He keeps having to move around awkwardly from place to place, trying out different spots, and after five minutes spent chasing signals that work for thirty seconds and then ebb away, he curses softly at the computer and Mark looks up, at him.

“You’d think a place like this would have a fucking ethernet port,” Eduardo offers, keeping his voice neutral.

Mark says, tonelessly, “Yeah. Maybe –” and he’s pushing at the heavy blinds on one of the windows, fumbling with the latch and throwing it wide open. The signal bars on Eduardo’s laptop fill right up in the most gratifying way, and with the fresh air and bright California sun pouring in, the room suddenly feels like a whole different country from the stale, sterile atmosphere in which they’ve been sitting these past few days.

Eduardo nods a curt _thanks_ and starts checking his messages, keeping one eye’s worth of peripheral vision on Mark, who’s doing the same. Both the message-checking and the side-eyeing, that is. Mark’s bathed in sunshine and it’s weird, seeing him that way: Eduardo thinks of Mark as something like a delicate piece of electronics, only taken outside when absolutely necessary, its natural habitat the backglow from a screen. In the natural light he looks out of place, younger, more like Eduardo remembers him from school. By now, midway through the day, he’s loosened his tie and undone the first button of his shirt, and where his collar opens Eduardo can see the hickey he left there on Mark’s unpliant throat last night. Against his skin it looks dark as a bruise, darker than he remembers it being.

He finishes with his emails and opens up a fresh one to his travel agent. **Singapore,** he types, **or maybe Hong Kong** (thinks, wryly, that it's a shame none of the countries that ban Facebook entirely are ones he'd want to live in). He's going to need _something_ to do, something other than mind his portfolio and not think about Mark Zuckerberg, after the settlement.

Because Eduardo doesn’t need to have been listening to the depositions, or pay attention to what his own counsel’s told him, or even know jack shit about law, to know that they will end up settling here today rather than going to trial. Nobody in their right mind wants Mark in a courtroom, trying to testify on his own behalf. He’d alienate everyone from stenographer to judge from the first moment he came slouching in in one of his basement-dweller hoodies like Our Lady of Perpetual Midterms, blatantly staring out the window and occasionally opening his mouth for the sole purpose of making sure that everybody in the room knew exactly how inferior he considered them. Facts be damned, the jurors would throw him to the wolves and smile while doing it.

Even back at Harvard, Eduardo had always maintained that he knew nobody else in the world with a comparable ability to somehow both understand what made people tick – Mark had studied psych, built what he’d learned into the guts of Facebook – and yet simultaneously _totally fucking fail_ to understand it, any of it, really.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

He looks up, suddenly aware of an absence of sound – like the absence is itself a noise, funny how that works – and realizes that Mark’s fingers have stopped tapping keys. This is because Mark is watching him. Eduardo meets his eyes levelly, because he can do this. He just has to put up with this kid’s presence in his life for a couple more hours, now, before it's all over.

A message pops up in the chat window of his email. Eduardo flicks his eyes from Mark’s face to his monitor, and he almost laughs – that cheerless snicker that’s been welling up at inconvenient moments lately – when he sees who it’s from. He thought he’d blocked all of Mark’s email accounts, but this must be a new one. Classic Mark, instant messaging someone who’s in the same damn room.

 **we won’t see each other again** , it says. And then a moment later, as if clarifying, **after this** , the wifi taking a little time to bounce its signal off some satellite in space, endless miles away, and back again to the conference room where they sit a table-length apart from each other.

Eduardo can’t tell if the message is a statement or a question, but he looks steadily back across the table at Mark, and he shakes his head.

Mark swallows, biting at his reddened bottom lip, and then he’s lowering his eyes to the screen again, fingers pattering furiously over the keypad for a few seconds before the distinctive right-hand tap to Enter. Then again, and again, and the words that swim up next into Eduardo’s chat window might as well be spoken in Mark’s actual voice, the distinctive speech patterns of bright but awkward undergrads the world over, hyperarticulate machine-gun bursts of defensive self-justification:

 **it’s just that, all things considered**  
I would prefer that you didn't think I deserved  
to be demonized here.  
obviously there were some regrettable miscommunications  
and emotional decisions, and I’ve owned my part in those already  
but what I do refuse to do is just bend over  
and submit to everyone else’s attempts to shift blame.  
you could have not put in the money  
you could have told me no  
at any time

and Eduardo stares at the screen so he won’t have to stare at Mark’s actual self there across the table, because what could he even say to that? Mention the incredibly obvious, totally unspeakable fact that back then, Eduardo had been constitutionally incapable of denying Mark basically anything? _Here, take nineteen thousand in seed money, the contacts I make through my psycho girlfriend, anything: just stay with me, here, please, don’t drop out of school and move to the opposite coast and be seduced by cooler people, things we didn't build together, lifestyles that aren’t ours. Tell me you need me and I'll crumble like a house of cards, just. Don’t leave me behind._

Eduardo fucking despises the weak naive whipped lovesick chump he was, used to be. He’s glad he got rid of him.

He misses him.

Mark’s still staring expectantly at him, and Eduardo gives up and lets out that ugly little laugh.

“Mark,” he says tiredly, out loud, not in any damn chat window. “Mark, you threw me under the fucking _bus,”_ and Mark flicks his eyes down and says softly, “It was business, it wasn’t personal.”

“It was personal,” Eduardo says, quiet and deliberate and rounding off every syllable, “to me.”

Outside the conference room he can hear footsteps, now, the lawyers heading back in to wrap things up, and he turns his eyes back to his monitor. He and Mark, they shouldn’t be seen talking to each other. He closes the chat window, and into the open email to the travel agent he types, **long-term move.**

Mark is still looking at him. He still does that thing he used to, where he pinches at the bridge of his nose with a couple of fingers when he’s confused or frustrated or stressed or scared or – whatever. Eduardo doesn’t know what the hell Mark’s feeling, right now, and he’s mostly able to convince himself that he doesn’t care.

He keeps his eyes on the screen.

He will sign off on the settlement, and so will Mark, and nobody will mention how it’s been bulked up by an extra ten percent to cover Mark’s ass PR-wise, compensate for his inability to win the sympathies of any jury in the land. They’ll have their bought truce, and he will never again see the _eureka_ flash that transfigures Mark’s face in the moment when he hits upon a good idea, the soft smug glow he wears right after he comes.

Eduardo types, **one-way.** He presses Send.

The door opens and Marylin comes in. She blinks against the intrusion of wind and sunlight into the room, and gives the both of them a strange startled look, sitting at their opposite ends of the table. “If you don’t mind –” she says, and goes to close the window.

“Oh,” says Mark quietly. He glances at his screen, where the signal bars must already be fading. “We were getting –”

“Go on,” Eduardo tells Marylin, and he shuts his laptop. “I think we’re all done here.”

**Author's Note:**

> includes rough sex with kink and vague consent issues, topping-as-dominance, hella unsafe barebacking, and brief orgasm denial.


End file.
